The Mexican ambassador to the United States on Thursday said a botched gun-tracking operation by America poisoned public opinion of the United States for the citizens of its southern neighbor.

Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan told a room of reporters on Capitol Hill that the failed Operation Fast and Furious, which has been the focus of a Republican investigation in the House for more than a year, put a lot of strain on U.S.-Mexico relations.

Fast and Furious has poisoned the well-spring of public opinion in Mexico as it relates to the cooperation and engagement with the United States, Sarukhan said.

It does put a lot of strain on the huge strides that weve achieved with two successive administrations in the United States, he said.

Sarukhan was on the Hill at the invitation of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to promote tighter gun laws in the United States, including the reinstatement of the federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.

Sarukhan argued that Mexico has seen an enormous surge in illegal assault weapons since the ban was allowed to expire and that more must be done in the United States to try and curb the number of guns flowing into Mexico.

Nearly 70 percent of all guns found in Mexico came from the United States since 2007, according to the latest data released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) last month.

Gun-rights advocates say the numbers do not accurately reflect the true number of guns found in Mexico, which they argue is much higher. Instead, they say, the ATF's data reflect only the number of guns that were submitted for traces.

Some gun advocates in the United States have argued that Democrats try to use the inflated numbers to make their case for stricter gun laws.

But Sarukhan, Democrats, and proponents for tighter gun laws cite the statistics in making their case to instate firmer penalties against illegal gun traffickers and straw buyers.

Beyond learning what happened in Fast and Furious, theres a much larger task at hand, which is how do we prevent the volumes of guns coming across the border into Mexico ... and feeding into the violence, said Sarukhan, referring to the nearly 50,000 people who have been killed in Mexico over the past five years since that nation declared a war on the drug cartels.

Fast and Furious was an attempt by the ATF to track the flow of weapons from the United States into Mexico by drug cartels in hopes of dismantling their network.

Nearly 2,000 guns were sold in the United States to straw buyers for the cartels, but instead of tracking the weapons, ATF agents were ordered to let them go with the hope of rediscovering them later at a crime scene or drug bust.

We are extremely concerned about what happened with Fast and Furious, Sarukhan said. The Mexican government was never appraised of how the operation was being designed and implemented, therefore we also asked for a full-fledged investigation from the Justice Department, which we are awaiting.

I hope to see that investigation concluded soon because hopefully that will provide some closer and a very clear sense of what happened and we hope also, if need be, the appropriate accountability of those involved, Sarukhan said.

The Department of Justice's inspector general, at the request of Attorney General Eric Holder, has been investigating Fast and Furious for more than a year and searching for who is responsible for the controversial gun walking tactics.

Sarukhan said that the Mexican government is conducting its own investigation into what happened once the weapons crossed the border from the United States.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has led Congresss investigation into the operation and recently took steps to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents that the powerful lawmaker has subpoenaed.

Obama and Holder have utter contempt for Mexico and in fact for any part of Latin America that is not solidly Communist yet.

This is particularly the case because the governing party of Mexico at the moment is the PAN, which is conservative (GOP style, that is) and one of the reasons that there is so much violence is that the PAN is breaking up the cozy relationship of official corruption that the criminal gangs had with the PRI (the left-wing party that ran Mexico into the ground for 60 years).

And, frankly, I think there’s also a lot of ethnic bias on the part of Holder and Obama against Latin Americans.

It’s about time Mexico woke up to what Obama/Holder are doing in their country. With 50,000 dead Mexican nationals and their bodies mutilated and their heads cut off, those guns were deliberately fed to international terrorists in Mexico, most likely muslims. Mexican nationals nor Colombians mutilate the bodies of the infidels. They are mostly Catholics. Now we have two battalions of these terrorists armed and hovering on our southern border. Not to mention Obama has every intention of destroying our relationships with our allies who would fight against communism. Especially on our southern and northern borders. Look what Obama just did to our relationship with Poland, Great Britain, and what he did to Canada with the pipeline. Mexico has been stupid to pander to Obama’s lies that American gunshops are excerbating the problems in Mexico instead of holding Obama/Holder themselves responsible. They knew about Fast and Furious, Holder went down there and bragged about it.

“Sarukhan was on the Hill at the invitation of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to promote tighter gun laws in the United States, including the reinstatement of the federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.

Sarukhan argued that Mexico has seen an enormous surge in illegal assault weapons since the ban was allowed to expire and that more must be done in the United States to try and curb the number of guns flowing into Mexico.”

I hope that most Mexicans have the sophistication to distinguish between the thuggish actions of the person occupying our White House and the United States as a whole. It’s Obama who is happy to facilitate the murder of Mexicans if it advances his political agenda, not ordinary decent Americans.

14
posted on 06/01/2012 4:57:56 AM PDT
by Pollster1
(A boy becomes a man when a man is needed - John Steinbeck)

Only option left now that the GOP has given marching orders to back off the poor baby and his boss less conservatives come off as racist for hoding “someone” in the US government responsible for this cluster.

15
posted on 06/01/2012 5:04:09 AM PDT
by freeangel
( (free speech is only good until someone else doesn't like it)

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